Whatever Night at the Movies...Germany 1980-81

For a couple of years in the 1980's I was stationed in a small town in northern Germany, Soegel. Pronounced a bit like Zergal, only not quite.

Anyway the town wasn't a whole lot more than a village, and only had about 7,000 inhabitants if I remember. The U.S. Army did not actually have any real assets there, and we worked on a German Luftwaffe (Air Force) base. They provided all our support, and the married families, German and American, lived in NATO housing.

The unit I was assigned to was a "special weapons" (read "nuclear") unit and controlled the warheads and provided training to the German units actually assigned to use the weapons.

Like the town, our footprint on the Luftwaffe base was very small and we had a few buildings, including a tiny NCO/EM Club, PX, and Commissary.

The army considered us to be an "isolated unit", and sent us movies to watch for free. We got new movies almost every day, but I must admit that I use the term "new" very carefully and with reservations.

The way it worked was that the army bought a certain number of movies to display, but it was a mix of fairly recent stuff and some I would not show my dog. The movie distribution was from post to post and we never really knew what was coming. Since there was a movie every night and there was not a lot of other things to do, especially for the families and those who did not drink heavily, people would just decide to go up to the movies and watch whatever was showing.

The movies were shown by guys who got off the duty roster by being a "projectionist" in a building that was not a whole lot more than a shed. There were no refreshments and people would often pop big bunches of popcorn for everyone to share and sometimes would bring sodas and candy.

For a short period of time while the movie was playing, we were just one big family, and people, especially the enlisted men, often got a kick out of my ex-wife telling the post commander's son to sit down and behave, since he was a junior. She would yell out, "Aaron Royer, sit down and behave yourself." and everyone would laugh, including Colonel Royer, the base commander.

We got to see some pretty decent movies on a regular basis, but there were some dogs and some mix-ups. These actually were generally considered to be part of the entertainment.

There was one movie, somewhere below Grade B, which was terrible. It was so bad, I wish I could find out what its name is and watch it again. In one scene, a car and a truck had stopped on a small road, the truck on one side, the car on the other.

In one shot, three people were standing directly in front of the truck talking. The camera angle changed and they were standing across the road by the car. Someone off-screen yelled at them and they looked startled and suddenly ran over to get back in front of the truck, resumed their positions, and started over.

In another scene, a character had to duck when the microphone dropped into the frame and almost hit him on the head.

On another occasion, we got the first and last reel of one movie and the middle reel of another. The projectionist had no way of knowing until the second movie started showing, and, once we figured out what had happened, just continued to show the odd reel to the finish and then put the last reel of the original movie on.

Oddly enough, it's fun to remember those strange movie nights.